An opening for beautiful mathematics at the secondary school level with speaker Manya Sundström, Umeå University
One of the key goals of Klein’s curriculum was to address what he called a “double discontinuity” in educating teachers. In the late 1800s, he noted, many teachers came to university unprepared for doing higher mathematics, and they returned to schools with abstract mathematics not suited for teaching in schools. It was Klein’s fervent goal to remove these discontinuities and make for a seamless transition from high school to university-level math.
This talk deals with what teaching elementary math from a higher standpoint might mean. Taking as a starting point Klein’s famous teaching notes, we provide a hands-on example of an alternative interpretation. Starting with what seems like a boring calculus task, we dig deeper and find some beautiful mathematics lurking therein.
